- State Board of Education members will get a cram course on evolution and creationism before establishing science standards for Ohio's children.

The board's standards committee yesterday agreed to invite national experts on the topics to a March meeting to help determine whether K-12 standards should include alternative theories of how human beings came to exist.

That decision came after at least five members of the nine-member committee charged Sunday that an advisory panel of scientists and educators the state assembled last year to help write the proposed standards "stacked the deck" in favor of evolution.

They said alternative theories, such as intelligent design, which suggests life was started by some form of higher intelligence, were ignored.

"I'm coming from the position on this issue that I don't think the process was fair," said board member Michael Cochran of Blacklick.

"I think there has been a pre-set agenda. I think it's now a better process than the one we had before."

The committee's decision to examine information on alternative theories to evolution may have placated Cochran, but it could place the board at loggerheads with the advisory panel of experts charged with helping to frame the proposal.

Members of the advisory panel, appointed last year by the state Education Department, have said they have a strong consensus that evolution should stand as the state's standard for explaining life on Earth.

"Creationism and intelligent design are more religious or philosophical areas than tested, scientific areas," said John Crooks.

Crooks is director of the Science and Mathematics Division at Lorain County Community College and a member of the panel that wrote the draft. "I'm confident the evolution standard will stay pretty much as it is."

Board member Deborah Owens-Fink of Richfield said yesterday that when she told one advisory panel member that she hoped the panel and board could find common ground, "the answer was that there was no common ground."

"Is there an opportunity to change the composition of the advisory group?" Owens-Fink asked yesterday.

But board President Jennifer Sheets of Pomeroy and standards committee Chairman Joseph Roman of Fairview Park asked that committee members work with the advisory panel as they gather more information on the issues.

"To completely bypass the group we asked to help us would be a mistake," Roman said.

Roman said the standards committee would meet Feb. 4 to talk more about the proposed standards. Later next month, the committee will receive legal opinions relevant to the inclusion of the intelligent design theory in science content standards. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1987 struck down a Louisiana law requiring that creationism and evolution be taught together, but the court's view of intelligent design is unclear.

The 19-member state board is expected to adopt science and social studies standards in December. Last month, the board adopted English and mathematics standards.